When Hampton moved to Four Corners, Lieut-Colonel De Salaberry, with the Canadian Voltigeurs, moved in like manner westward to the region of the Châteauguay and English Rivers. The Voltigeur troops were French-Canadians with a small sprinkling of British. Their organization was as follows:—Sir George Prevost, on the approach of war, May 28th, 1812, ordered the levy of four French volunteer battalions, to be made up of unmarried men from 18 to 25 years old. They were to be choice troops, and trained like regulars. Charles Michel d'Irumberry De Salaberry, then high in the regard of his people as a military hero, was chosen to rally the recruits, issued a stirring poster calling the French-Canadians to arms, and acted with such extraordinary energy that the troops were in hand in two days.
De Salaberry was a perfect type of the old French-Canadian military gentry, a stock of men of whom very little remains, a breed of leaders of, on the whole, more vigorous forms, more active temperaments, than the average—descendants inheriting the qualities of the bravest and most adventurous individuals of former times. They were the natural result of the feudal régime, with which they have passed away. Though a gentry, they were a poor one, possessed of little else than quantities of forest lands. The officers of the Voltigeurs were selected out of the same class, united with a number of English of similar stamp. De Salaberry himself was born in the little cottage manor-house of Beauport, near Quebec, on the 19th of Nov., 1778.[11] Taking to soldiering like a duck to water when very young, he enrolled as volunteer in the 44th. At sixteen, the Duke of Kent, who was then in Canada, and delighted in friendly acts towards the seigneurs, got him a commission in the 60th, with which regiment he left at once for the West Indian Isle of Dominica. There he saw terrible service, for all the men of his battalion except three were killed or wounded during the seige of Fort Matilda. Nevertheless, the young fellow kept gay. "Our uniforms," he wrote to his father, "cost very dear; but I have received £40, and with that I am going to give myself what will make a fine figure." "This fine large boy of sixteen years," says Benjamin Sulte in his History of the French-Canadians, "strong as a Hercules ... with smiling face ... made a furore at parties.... As he was never sick, they employed him everywhere. Fevers reduced his battalion to 200 men, but touched not him." Though so young, he was charged with covering the evacuation of Fort Matilda.[12]
The Duke of Kent, who was commanding at Halifax, kept a friendly eye upon him, and gave him much personal advice, on one occasion dissuading him from an inadvisable marriage. He now took him into his own regiment. De Salaberry still saw rough service, was shipwrecked, served in the West Indies again, and then fought in Europe and the disastrous expedition to Walcheren, where he was placed in the most advanced posts.[13] Returning to his 60th, he was made captain in 1799. "I have often heard say," narrates De Gaspé, "that his company and that of Captain Chandler were the best drilled in the regiment." In the West Indies he was drawn into a duel which caused him sorrow until his dying day, for in it he was forced by the "code of honor" to kill a German fellow-officer, and bore a scar of the affair ever after on his forehead. It is related that by his great strength he cut the German in two.
"The prodigious force with which he was endowed," says Sulte, "had made of him an exceptional being in the eyes of the soldiers," and when he returned to Canada after West Indian service of eleven years[14] a little before the war of 1812, he was already the hero of the French-Canadians. That the stories of his strength and vigor are true is corroborated by every circumstance which has been perpetuated about him. His ruddy, energetic face is preserved in portraits among his family, and his walking-stick, said to be an enormous article, is kept at Quebec in the collection of the Literary and Historical Society.
De Salaberry's Voltigeurs were organized at a peculiar juncture. "The discords between French and English in Quebec had emboldened the United States," says Garneau, "and the English Governors harassed the French. An opposite conduct might bring back calm to men's spirits. The Governor of Nova Scotia, Sir George Provost, a former officer, of Swiss origin, offered all the conditions desirable.... Arriving at Quebec, Sir George Provost strove to introduce peace and to remove animosity. He showed the completest confidence in the fidelity of the French-Canadians, and studied how to prove at every opportunity that the accusations of treason which had been brought against them had left no trace in the soul of England nor in his own.... Soon the liveliest sympathy arose between Sir George Prevost and the people."[15] It was in pursuance of this policy that the order to raise the Voltigeur force was given by him.
While Hampton was at Four Corners, Sir George, thus now Commander-in-Chief of all the forces in Canada, was at the camp which had just been formed at La Fourche, and of which a description is given by Mr. Sellar in his history of the district. Sir George was a man quite devoid of the decisiveness necessary to a soldier, and though, as we have seen, he was useful in reconciling the French, his errors in military matters several times brought disgrace on the British forces, and gave rise to storms of rage and disgust among them.[16] De Salaberry was now ordered by him on the Quixotic errand of attacking, with about 200 Voltigeurs and some Indians, the large camp of Hampton at Four Corners. De Salaberry promptly obeyed these impracticable orders, and it is probably at this juncture that a little anecdote comes in which I have heard as told by one of his men. De Salaberry was down the river dining at a tavern, when a despatch was brought to him.
"D—— it!" he exclaimed, jumping up from his seat, "Hampton is at Four Corners, and I must go and fight him!" and mounting his fine white charger, he dashed away from the door.
On the 1st of October he crept up with his force to the edge of the American camp. There they saw the assemblage spread out in all the array of war, with its host of tents, stacked guns, flags, moving men and sentries, and he prepared to strike it as ordered. One of his Indians indiscreetly discharged his musket. The camp was in alarm in an instant. De Salaberry, finding his approach discovered, immediately collected about fifty of his Voltigeurs, with whom and the Indians he pushed into the enemy's advanced camp, consisting of about 800 men, and, catching them in their confusion, drove them for a considerable distance, until, seeing the main body manoeuvring to cut off his little handful, he fell back and took up his position at the skirt of the woods. Once again he sallied out and charged, but with all the army now thoroughly aroused it was useless, and the Indians having retreated, most of his own men ran off, leaving him and Captains Chevalier Duchesnay and Gaucher, officers much like himself in stamp, with a few trusty Voltigeurs to skirmish with the enemy as long as daylight permitted it.[17] He then withdrew to Châteauguay, taking the precaution of breaking up the forest road in his rear, in pursuance of the general policy of the campaign, which was to destroy and obstruct as much as possible in the path of the enemy. Acquainting himself also with the ground over which Hampton was expected to make his way into the Province, he finally stopped, selected and took up the position where the battle afterwards took place, in a thick wood on the left bank of the Châteauguay River at the distance of two or three leagues above its Fork with English River, where he threw up his works of defence, with the approval of General De Watteville. The plan of the British commanders, owing to the smallness and inefficiency of their forces, was the stern one of burning and destroying all houses and property, and retreating slowly to the St. Lawrence, harassing the enemy in his advance.[18] The position chosen was as strong as the nature of that flat and wooded country and the route of the American march would allow. Here his experience and quick eye came in.[19]
Now as to the measures of fortification taken by De Salaberry. In his rear there was a small rapid where the river was fordable in two spots close to one another. He commanded this with a strong breastwork and a guard. There were four ravines which issued from the very thick woods, crossing the road, and distant from each other two hundred yards or so. On their banks he made his men fell trees and build them into breastworks—"a kind of parapet extending into the woods some distance." To prevent the American cannon from bearing on these breastworks, he felled trees and bush, covering a large stretch of ground with obstructions in the front. The breastwork on the front-line formed an obtuse angle at the right of the road, and extended along the curves of the ravine. The Colonel then sent forward to a spot some distance in advance of the front-line a party of Beauharnois' axemen, well accustomed to felling trees, who destroyed the bridges and obstructed the road with their fragments and fallen trees and brush. Lieut. Guy, with twenty Voltigeurs, guarded them in front, and Lieut. Johnson, with about the same number, in rear. Working incessantly, these axemen made a formidable series of such obstructions in front of the first line, extending from the river three or four acres into the woods, where they joined an almost impracticable marsh. On the opposite bank of the river De Salaberry also placed a picket of sixty Beauharnois militia under Captain Bruyère, so as to check any advance on the ford, which was his weak point in the rear.
Part of De Salaberry's line at the abattis, was a small blockhouse on the river-bank (which, however, is not that which has since been reputed to be the one concerned), and the works there blocked the commencement of the wood and looked out on a broadening plain or level of clearings, across which the enemy would have to pass.